CteinPhoto
Chieftain
- Joined
- Nov 25, 2005
- Messages
- 17
Dear Folks,
Background:
I wrote a while ago asking about whether a Matrox P650 AGP card (64 meg) would run Civ IV. Well, the good news is that it will. The bad news is that it's very sluggish-- it and Civ IV don't seem to get along very well. The opening movie plays with huge video dropouts-- only 2 seconds of motion out of every 10 seconds. The game itself? Well, with graphics settings at their lowest levels, frame rate can be as poor as 2.7 frames per second. Not fun.
It's definitely video limitations-- I just upgraded the CPU in my system and while CPU intensive apps like Photoshop showed an improvement, Civ performance didn't improve one bit. It's not other hardware limitations- my Win2K system has 2Gig of RAM and plenty of fast HD scratch space.
That's the situation. Here's what I'd like to do. I'd like to get a second video card just for playing things like Civ IV. But it'd have to go in a PCI slot, because my AGP slot's taken up with the Matrox card. Are there any PCI cards out there which will play Civ IV at a decent rate? If so, what's the cheapest one that people consider acceptable?
Tough question, lotsa judgement calls, I know. But, hey, I want your judgement. Thanks!
pax / Ctein
Background:
I wrote a while ago asking about whether a Matrox P650 AGP card (64 meg) would run Civ IV. Well, the good news is that it will. The bad news is that it's very sluggish-- it and Civ IV don't seem to get along very well. The opening movie plays with huge video dropouts-- only 2 seconds of motion out of every 10 seconds. The game itself? Well, with graphics settings at their lowest levels, frame rate can be as poor as 2.7 frames per second. Not fun.
It's definitely video limitations-- I just upgraded the CPU in my system and while CPU intensive apps like Photoshop showed an improvement, Civ performance didn't improve one bit. It's not other hardware limitations- my Win2K system has 2Gig of RAM and plenty of fast HD scratch space.
That's the situation. Here's what I'd like to do. I'd like to get a second video card just for playing things like Civ IV. But it'd have to go in a PCI slot, because my AGP slot's taken up with the Matrox card. Are there any PCI cards out there which will play Civ IV at a decent rate? If so, what's the cheapest one that people consider acceptable?
Tough question, lotsa judgement calls, I know. But, hey, I want your judgement. Thanks!
pax / Ctein